November 25, 2017

Very happy that my suggested name for a beer to be served at the baseball at the Canberra Cavalry’s matches was the winner of a poll by the brewery. Designated Bitter is the name, and I can’t wait to try it! Bentspoke will have the beer on tap at the ball park. You can read more about that here. Next to having a beer called Penelope’s Special, this is as good as it gets! Here’s the logo.

To celebrate, here’s a poem I first posted 5 years ago on this blog.

In the pub

Wedges of moon
float in my glass
sky lemon stings

Vodka ice glass
nine tenths hide below
Cold leg’s hard kick

Poker beeps
sour head nods in shame
beer swims laps

Salt chips taste
absent smoke feathers
long since flown

PS Cottier

That’s all a bit grim, really, but I’m too stuffed to write one about the joys of beer (and baseball) just now, as…

I returned from Bega an hour ago, a town just inland from the far south coast of NSW, where there was a launch of a new publication; a chapbook called Muse which will hopefully appear once every season. It is the sister publication to Mnesomnye, an online journal edited by a group of women on the south coast. It contains great photos by Jodie Dickinson.

Bega was a real surprise; a great bookshop where the launch was held (Candelo Books), a table raising money for Rohingya refugees, and a really nice shopping strip on Carp Street. I wish I could have spent more time there.

Driving back there was about a kilometre of highway with enormous cows grazing unconstrained on each side, so it wasn’t exactly like Braddon.

September 21, 2017

A new online women’s poetry journal, based in Canberra and edited by Sandra Renew and Moya Pacey, has been launched called Not Very Quiet and I have three poems in it, covering such topics as homelessness — and the middle class desire to avoid the homeless — depression, and the way that depressed people are patronised, and annoying editors, and what should be done with them. That links to the last mentioned poem, which is the funniest one. Writing humorous poetry that also has more than laughs to it is quite an art, I think, and one type of work that I like to write. Have a look around at the journal, which contains a lot of interesting poetry.

Another newish journal is Mnemosyne: South Coast Women’s Journal which is edited by a group of women from, or living on, the south coast of NSW. I wrote a poem called ‘Going to the Coast’, which was published as part of their ‘Flash Fiction Friday’ initiative. A very lovely journal with a lot of ideas behind it.

If anyone is wondering how the name is pronounced; it’s a bit like Penelope. Which does not rhyme with antelope.

June 12, 2017

I just had three poems published at Eureka Street called ‘Three aspects of Australian racism’, ‘Doing a Bradbury’, and ‘Release the dogs of scorn!’.

Why not have a read? I was quite angry when I wrote two of them, and I think it shows. Some think that poetry is the loser if there’s too much anger, but I don’t necessarily agree.

A very well-balanced type of poem, where everything is smooth and lovely, and where any aspect of the external world that manages to sneak in seemingly exists only for the benefit of the poet, begins to annoy me very quickly. There’s certainly a place for political poetry of the more obvious sort, so long as it avoids rant and cliché. You can comment at Eureka Street, should you feel so inclined.

And here’s a very cool picture of a giant. I’m not quite uncouth enough to make a political statement out of him. Not this week, anyway.

(For overseas readers, the Bradbury mentioned in one poem is Steven Bradbury, who won Australia’s first Winter Olympics gold medal in a memorable way.)

April 19, 2017

Hunt

She stalks them, device in hand, in a modern bloodless hunt. They hide near buildings, the cute light beings, and she captures them with her e-net. The one she desired most appeared; half hedgehog and half platypus.

‘Great!’ she said. She had been searching just for him. He was king of all the cute light creatures. She lined up the e-net with the furry ball, with his fringe of pink spikes.

The hedgepus pounced, all claws and teeth. He skinned and ate her, with the efficiency that only practice brings. They stalk humans, the light things, and no nets are necessary. Their hunt is not bloodless.

His cuteness returned, with only a few stains on the fur near his mouth. People would assume that he had eaten too many berries. The hedgepus is said to relish the raspberry.

A kidney marked the spot, flung out like confetti.

PS Cottier

This micro story was highly commended in the Microfiction category of the Fellowship of Australian Writers National Awards for 2016, just announced. (I’ve edited it a little since then.) I also won another category, called the ‘How-Tweet-It-Is Poetry Award’. I won’t post that one, though, as I have submitted it for publication Elsewhere. That second award allowed me to try out a poem short enough for Twitter, without joining that foul and parasitic ‘conversation’.

I also enjoy writing the occasional wee story, like the one above, safe from the constraints of character. And often plot… Prose poetry morphs into story quicker than seagulls wolf chips.

Very happy to be highly commended for a tiny horror story, too.

Next week, I promise fewer internal organs, and even a different image.

January 20, 2017

On the sticky retirement of myth

Pegasus got too old
so Bellerophon melted him for glue.
Useless glue; for each pot is full
of feathers. Lovely scrapbooks
are ruined by inconvenient discards,
as grandmothers grow downy beards,
and babies sport Trumpy wigs.
And they fly into the air, too,
the photos, nay, the very books,
and escape into the ether,
to gallivant with feckless clouds.
Never use a famous wingéd horse,
where a broken legged nag will do.

P.S. Cottier

There’s a bit of my recently adopted veganism peeking around the corner of that poem!

A thoughtful review of my chapbook Quick Bright Things: Poems of Fantasy and Myth just appeared at the Science Fiction Poetry Association website (also extracts of the review appear in in Star*Line, the Association’s journal). The reviewer is Sandra J. Lindow, a well-known poet in the speculative field. (The review appears quite a way down the linked page.)

Ms Lindow writes of the chapbook that that ‘(t)he tone clip-clops down a slope elevated by the language [of] Victorian fairy-lore poetry…’. I hadn’t consciously thought of that, but she is quite right. That’s what happens when you write a PhD on Dickens, I guess! And Goblin Market has always fascinated me. The review refers to Christina Rossetti, author of that long poem.

Nice to have an Australian chapbook reviewed at the US based site. I am a member of the SFPA, and recommend it to anyone interested in science fiction, horror, or fantasy poetry.

I was rapt to read that ‘P.S. Cottier’s slender chapbook of nineteen fantastic poems is like an elegant carriage ride through a department store of social criticism.’ Or perhaps I should say enraptured, in keeping with that older time?